A Muse On Bottled Beer - The Sinners
Created | Updated May 3, 2005
Sinners Index
- Anheuser Busch - Budweiser
- Guinness - Enigma
- 'Brewed Under License in the UK'
- Super Strength Lagers
- San Miguel
- St.Peter's Brewery - King Cnut Ale
- Double Maxim Brewing Company - Double Maxim
- Scottish & Newcastle - Newcastle Star
- Marston's - Single Malt
The Sinners 
Anheuser-Busch's Budweiser Why? Can anyone explain this stuff to me? As far as I can tell the only beer like characteristic it has is that it is wet. (Which I suppose at the end of the day is a good characteristic for a beer to have 
) But how about a little flavour? I guess the concept of "taste" in American beers disappeared with prohibition. Will it ever come back?
Guinness Enigma is a vile and dirty lager brewed to fit the lowest common denominator. Its so bad I don't think they make it anymore, I can't find any mention of it on the Official Guinness Website. I recall it came in a silver can with a widget1 in it, to release all of the CO2 in the can instantaneously to create a head on the beer. What they didn't explain was that the can needed to be ice cold for this to happen properly. Any warmer and it would go off like a bomb - beer everywhere!
Well in practise its explosive tendencies were the least of this beer's worries. The main problem was it tasted all wrong. When you opned a can and it had done its CO2 conversion thing and you had poured it into a glass you were faced with a totally flat lager with a head that looked like shaving foam. Very suspicious.
"Brewed Under Licence in the UK" If you see this on a can or bottle of European beer for sale in Britain. Run away, run away now and do it fast! This will be a weakened, gassy, bowdlerised version of what was, in all probability a very reasonable European brew. Beers to have suffered this fate include Stella Artois2, Kronenbourg, Lowenbrau, Amstel, Carlsberg and the one that must have suffered the most Heineken - which if you ever get the chance to sample in its original Dutch form is really really good.
Super Strength Lagers are a strange sub-species of the beer family. They are brewed to between 9% and 10% alcohol and produced with the express purpose of getting the consumer very drunk very quickly.
Now there is nothing wrong with getting drunk you may say, and I would tend to agree. However the problem comes with the brewing process used to achieve such strengths. Under normal circumstances when you kick a bunch of grain around with some water and a bit of yeast, you are hard pushed to get anything much stronger than about 6% alcohol out of it. With the Super Strengths the grain has to be put under a lot more stress which has a detrimental effect on the taste of the final product. Typically they taste rather metallic, very sweet and have a sticky texture to them. Not nice at all
If however you insist on giving this stuff a go, I would "recommend" Carlsberg's Special Brew or Kestral Super neither is really drinkable, but they are, I suppose, the best of a bad (and worryingly large) bunch. And anyway once you've tried a can of each, you will in all probability be to 
to sample the lesser members of the species. Just one final point, don't go anywhere near Tennents' Super as it is distilled hatred and drinking it in public will make you look like a wino.
Update:
Since I discovered that Carlsberg's Special Brew is available from the Eastenders cheap booze outlet in Calais for a mere £15.95 3 per slab - that's 24 x 500ml cans or 108 units of alcohol 
. I feel I maybe forced to promote this particular brand of Super Strength lager upwards into a different category. Yes so it still tastes pretty shit. But hey, at those prices some things just have to be done 
San Miguel4 is the most popular beer in Spain. And when you taste it you suddenly realise why Spain is a wine drinking country. The beer, originating from Barcelona I believe, has absolutely nothing to recommend itself to the discerning drinker. Nor indeed to the p**sed up English tourist, 'cos it only makes them more p**sed and aggressive.
I can't give any taste notes as it has no taste to describe. I can't even tell you how strong it is, as it was such a boring beer I couldn't be bothered to read the label on the bottle. All I can say is its wet, but so is Bognor Regis in the rain. Nuff said
UPDATE
Since writing this original disparaging review of San Miguel I have been away on a two week holiday to Tenerife with LighthouseGirlUK. Whilst there the only widely available beer for me to drink was the aforementioned San Mig, and do you know I made an interesting discovery...
...the version there wasn't bad
. It is brewed stronger than the 'export' version available in the UK at some 5.4% abv. Plus it has a reasonable flavour - not brilliant, but quite drinkable.
So, you may ask, will I be promoting this beer out of the Sinners section and into somewhere else? Well no actually. This is because Tenerife is at least a 4 hour plane ride away - plus all the hassles with airport security confiscating your nail clippers as an offensive weapon (
) - which is far to much trouble to make it worthwhile popping over there for a spot of carry out.
No one likes a show off. And that is 'exactly' what King Cnut Ale from the St.Peter's Brewery of Bungay, Suffolk is 
The beer is an attempt to recreate the beer drunk in England in the time of the first millennium, hence the name. What distinguishes brewing in those times was that hops weren't used to add bitterness and flavour. In fact hops weren't used in English beer until some time in the 14th Century. What the brewers have used instead is stinging nettles and juniper berries5. The resulting brew is very dark and comes with an aroma of roasted barley. But there is no bitterness to the beer, and that for one, is the main thing I like about beer. Hence it gets a bit of a slating here.
Another thing that I don't like about this beer, well actually it applies to the whole brewery really. Is that they bottle their beers in repro 17th century oval bottles. Down even to the inconsistecies in the glass moulding of the time. Then they turn around and make a big thing of this feature - as if we care! All that really happens is that the bottles don't stack properly in the bag when you take them for recycling, and the additional cost of using a weird bottle gets passed onto us the consumer.
Double Maxim is brewed by the Double Maxim Brewing Company in the Northern city of Sunderland. Originally this was a brand of the Vaux brewery it was resurrected when that company went belly up. The beer itself is a pleasant and unoffensive ale, much in the style of Newky Broon but maybe not as sweet.
However it has two 'little' problems as far as I'm concerned.
- Its brewed by filthy Makems6
- It formed 90% of my friend Jo's stomach contents the night she decided to throw up all over me in the Leadmill.
It is with a heavy heart that I have to condemn a second North Eastern beer. This time it is a special effort from Scottish & Newcastle, who as you know from above are the makers of Newky Broon.
This 'special effort' is a beer brewed for competitions and goes by the name of The Newcastle Star. It's obvious from the bottle where it's heritage lies. The bottle comes with the famous Star logo with the picture of the Tyne bridge. And it was this that encouraged me to give this beer a try.
Oh dear, not a nice beer. I would best describe it as Newcastle Brown on steriods. All the ingredients that make up the original drink are in this beer, yet all of them are hyped up until it just becomes a clash of flavours and textures, it has none of the subtlety of the original. A great shame really...
Eventually I suppose it had to happen. Marston's have come up with a truly duff beer
Their effort by the name of Single Malt is an insipid orange looking mess. It has no head to speak of after pouring, it feels thin as you knock it back and comes with a distinctly 'tinny' aftertaste. There are lots of claims by the brewery that it should be good, and these are claims that one can see should be right. For example they use Golden Promise hops, as beloved of the whisky makers of Scotland. But somehow it just doesn't hang together in the wash as a decent beer.
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